We Won’t Get Fooled Again?
We won't get fooled again. That line from rock group The Who has always carried a certain swagger, a declaration that the next round of official promises will meet harder scrutiny than the last. In August 2026 it found an unexpected echo in the voice of Kyle Sandilands, the long-time radio provocateur who once lent his platform and his rhymes to the government's Covid vaccination drive.
On his new show Sandilands looked back at 2021 without the usual armour of defiance. He admitted he had been wrong. He and a host of other broadcasters and television presenters, he said, had been fooled into promoting the vaccine. The government told them the message was imperative; they believed it. Sandilands even recorded a novelty track, "Get Vax Baby," set to the beat of Vanilla Ice, urging Australians to roll up their sleeves. He insists he was never paid for the performance. He simply thought he was doing the right thing. What still rankles him is the later realisation that officials already knew vaccination would not stop infection or transmission, yet the public messaging continued as if it would.
The same note of regret has sounded from Karl Stefanovic. In 2021 he fronted Channel Nine's polished "This is Our Shot" campaign alongside a parade of network personalities. Years later he says he is sorry for the role he played in not questioning the science more rigorously and for helping to isolate those who refused the mandates. The media, he now believes, should have stayed in the business of information rather than joining the machinery of persuasion.
Not everyone on Sandilands' current programme shares the retrospective unease. One colleague dismisses the entire debate as ancient history; another producer who never took the vaccine declares himself the winner. Sandilands answers that the people who still care are those who suffered side-effects. The exchange is messy, unfinished, and therefore more honest than the seamless messaging of five years earlier.
What lingers is the larger pattern. Public figures who once amplified the official line now concede they were misled, or at least insufficiently sceptical. The admission arrives too late for the jobs lost, the relationships strained, and the trust eroded. Yet the admission itself matters. It marks a small crack in the old consensus and a reminder that institutional confidence is not the same thing as institutional competence. The next time authorities arrive with urgent certainties and catchy slogans, a larger portion of the audience may remember the song that once promised they would not be fooled again, and decide, this time, to mean it.
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16045875/kyle-sandilands-covid.html
